'Don't throw out that old plastic bottle,' said a Cancer friend to me once.  'It might come in useful sometime.'  This piece of advice is a paradigm (a miniature replica of a much larger reality) of Cancer.  Whether it's an old plastic bottle, an old lover, an old house, an old belief, an old bit of string, an old memory…Hang on to it, says Cancer.  You never know when you might need it again.  Not that Cancer is a particularly 'practical' sign in the way we have met practicality in the element of earth.  Cancer is much too imaginative, too immersed in a world of dreams and longings and subtle currents of emotion, to treat everything in the literal terms of how much it's worth.   But one of the strongest urges in this watery sign is the urge for security.  For what's known and familiar, comforting and safe.  It is an emotional motivation, not a practical one.  I once knew a Cancer man who kept an old shoebox locked in a desk drawer.  In it was the most bizarre assortment of objects gathered together that I have ever seen:  old chewing-gum wrappers (thankfully the gum was missing), pieces of rope, old photographs, bits of lace, nuts and screws and used bent nails, fragments of magazine articles, a dried flower of unknown origin, and most difficult to believe, an old (and used) French letter.  At this point, being familiar with astrology, I didn't even bother to ask why.  I knew the answer. 

Now this rather extreme example of Cancer's penchant for saving things is a little pathological.  But you can be sure that every Cancer has a metaphorical shoebox somewhere, where things from the past linger.  Beneath the Crab's peculiar and often disconcerting penchant for not letting go - of anything - lies one of the most sensitive and vulnerable of all the zodiacal signs.  Cancer is ruled by the moon, and the moon's phases, constantly shifting and changing, are an apt image of the constant ebb and flow of moods, desires, feelings, fears and intuitions that wash through this apparently solid and conservative temperament.  Yes, conservative.  Think about what the word means.  Cancer knows all about conservation.  Waste not, want not.  With all the canniness of a Scot (Scotland, in fact, is said to be ruled by Cancer), the Cancerian will carefully nurture and protect those tender feelings beneath a bristling fortified wall of souvenirs, mementoes, stock certificates, insurance policies, old photographs, family support, tradition, and a strong tendency toward preserving the status quo.  That is, as long as the status quo protects 'me and mine.' 

Cancer is traditionally the sign of the family.  This doesn't necessarily mean that every Cancer wants, or should have, a family in the conventional sense.  Lots of Cancers, contrary to popular conception, are not domestic.  They needn't have ties of blood.  But